Word travels slowly

That's a good article about the law of unintended consequences. In a previous life, as an employee of an agricultural chemical company, I witnessed the introduction of glyphosate and it was nothing less than a revolution: a non-toxic (to animals) herbicide with a known mechanism of action. No one gave two thoughts about the expected bactericidal (and the unknown mycorrhicidal) activity. I will note one small criticism of the reporting. In my previous life, I studied the lateral diffusion of pesticides in soil, and the article's claim of glyphosate traveling from one field to another during times of heavy runoff stretches my credulity. Far more likely, it seems to me, the spray drifts into adjacent fields during application and then washes into the soil during a rainstorm. The one exception I can imagine is the spread of pesticides from an uphill field to a downhill one.

Mark Lipton
 
...during times of heavy runoff stretches my credulity. Far more likely, it seems to me, the spray drifts into adjacent fields during application and then washes into the soil during a rainstorm. The one exception I can imagine is the spread of pesticides from an uphill field to a downhill one.
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I don't understand the credulity. Rains wash the soil. Things that are on or part of the soil run off. Sometimes a simple explanation explains it best. It's too bad Monsanto has the ears (and wallets and seeds) of farmers. Let's hope things can change.
 
Mark,
Rain water will, in the absence of other forces, travel straight down into the water table. There is some small amount of lateral diffusion as a result of capillary action, but it's almost negligible compared to the motion of the water. If you receive such a deluge that the ground saturates, the water will run off, but in that case it's not going to extract glyphosate out of the soil to any significant extent, as the glyphosate isn't on the surface of the soil. I actually modeled this very situation computationally when I was in the biz, so I can say this with some certainty.

Mark Lipton
 
Several things that struck me about the article: It's written by someone who has has a history of writing bad science articles. It's full of anecdotes but not very heavy on empirical studies. Verity is behind the infamous Judy Carman pig-stomach study that was shit science and has been very heavily criticized and Verity relies heavily on misinformation and bad science in all its propaganda. It doesn't mention if the compared fields were tilled or no-till. So this is really just another anti-GMO and anti-Monsanto screed instead a good criticism. I'm still not convinced that Roundup is somehow the super-evil herbicide that such screeds make it out to be. Is this article really just an appeal to nature -fallacy?
 
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